This book is a playful travel diary about Julio Cort\u00e1zar and his wife Carol Dunlop. They spent 33 days travelling from Paris to Marseille along the motorway. Rather than driving straight there, they aimed to stop at every single rest area – 65 in total, two per day – spending the night at the second one. This turned the ordinary journey into an imaginary expedition. Through humour, games and observations, they transformed the motorway into a world of adventure. They thought they were being followed by the police, spied on by the numerous and very different rubbish bins, and found themselves in a place of witchcraft. Beneath its playful tone, the book is also a touching portrait of their relationship, capturing their enjoyment of slowing down and discovering the everyday world and themselves. Knowing that they both died very soon after this trip – Carol Dunlop a few months afterwards and Julio Cort\u00e1zar two years later – makes the story even more poignant. With its full set of photos of their red Volkswagen bus, the dragon Fafner, this is a unique book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Like other rest stops, this one has an area arrived at by following a series of signs that say CHILDREN’s PLAYGROUND. The games seemed to be varied, rustic, nice. Seemed to be. They seemed varied, rustic and nice until the illumination. Games for children – those constructions with thick planks for bases, those shapes that inevitably evoked another kind of game based on horror and suffering? Everything came together in a second, and we knew the truth: we were in the place where witches are punished and executed, and the rest area was a masterpiece of camouflage designed to hide what only an expedition and long experience like ours could discover.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This book is a playful travel diary about Julio Cort\u00e1zar and his wife Carol Dunlop. They spent 33 days travelling from Paris to Marseille along the motorway. Rather than driving straight there, they aimed to stop at every single rest area – 65 in total, two per day – spending the night at the second […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22744,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[291,296],"tags":[172,64,80],"class_list":["post-22743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-2026","category-year-of-reading-2026","tag-couple","tag-madness","tag-travel"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/miles-farnsworth-TAKEKSne84M-unsplash-scaled-e1790684026272.jpg?fit=2560%2C1425&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22746,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22743\/revisions\/22746"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}